2009-02-18

It may not be so useful, but emacs23 allows you to manipulate the transparency of your emacs frames (windows). If you use Windows or X with a compositing window manager on X, you can make your windows transparent. Examples of compositing window managers are Compiz/Beryl and even the good-old Metacity (gconftool-2 -s '/apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager' --type bool true).

The following code for your .emacs makes it easy to set transparency from within emacs:

Now, you can make make emacs more transparent (less opaque) by pressing C-9, while C-8 has the opposite effect. C-0 brings us back to normality.

Admittedly, window transparency is a classical solution-looking-for-a-problem. But let that not stop us from using it -- now we can watch full-screen movies while still using emacs. That, my friends, is progress.

@Anonymous: I don't think that's possible currently -- however, why don't you just move all the Desktop clutter in a folder called 'DesktopClutter', and get a nice relaxing background image from e.g. interfacelift.com (when it's back)?